Hour 32

Her invisibility had long lapsed as she sat sweating, hands continuing to remain devotedly cinched into Rico's neck. His body hadn't fought for air in a while and had notably relaxed into a flaccid dead weight against her chest. Speculating she might still need to take his phone to conclude the game, she tore it from the confines of his right pocket, a lucky guess, and fell backward, shoving his body off of her and scrambling to the wall for support. The way his form gave into gravity and curled forward with a top-heavy collapse was unsettling, but she wasn't distracted by that; her attention was fully devoted to the fact she had his phone, and the game didn't end. She thought with an exhausted, defeated logic, "Someone else must still be alive." She threw her head down and punched the cold tile floor. This wasn't the time for frustration though, not when she was so close to the end. She collected her thoughts and stood back up, feeling almost as heavy as she had back in the final segment of the race, her body shivering from both physical and mental strain. Before she left she made sure to rescue Alex's phone from beside Rico's body and held it close to her chest; she knew deep down she hadn't planned for his phone to save her, nor had Alex, but the fact it had made it feel as though he was still here with her if for but a brief moment. She knew she couldn't allow herself to indulge in sentimentality for long though, so she took Rico's machete and left the science lab.

She hadn't given it much thought up until this point since the game had warped reality so flippantly, but both rooms she had entered in this bizarre maze of a hotel had been tied to past memories, her house, and Alex's old school. Her house wasn't as strange; it had been the starting point of the game for her after all, but Alex's school was different; how could such personal information be manifested into existence? There had to be a connection, a reason, but she couldn't come up with a satisfying answer. She staggered through the dark hallways, dragging Rico's machete like some kind of NPC in a horror game. It bounced with every wobble of her hurt ankle but stopped as she stood in front of the doorway she had entered from. It was Alex's old classroom, an undeniable fact even as the door stood ajar and revealed the hotel hallway behind it. She tightened her grip on the machete and soldiered on, she didn't want to give Rico's body the chance to reanimate like her mothers had. Aware that someone might be hiding with invisibility, she focused her attention on remaining quiet and listening, but she didn't hear anything besides her own heartbeat as she descended back to her original floor. As she walked down her old floor hallway, she heard something diluting the silence, not a very loud sound and difficult to locate. It sounded familiar but also strange, a natural sound punctuated with something extra. Then, as she approached the middle of the hall, she understood it was breathing. At first, she reacted with an aggressiveness that forced her posture to stiffen and her eyes to sharpen, but it only took a few seconds for her to decide the aspiration she heard was labored well beyond normal. That's when she noticed a shape breaking the form of its upper body with each dry breath much unlike the other inanimate corpses next to him. As Emi came upon him she saw Akachukwu was still barely clinging to life next to a deceased Sasha and Sang-Wook, struggling with all his might to stay conscious. She didn't have to be a medical student to know Akachukwu wasn't going to live; his entire torso was separated down the middle, and each breath looked like a monstrous feat that could be his last. She knew she should be cold-blooded and kill him, but his face made it hard. His face held no animosity or hostile intentions, it was the look of an innocent young man coming to terms with his impending death. She could see tears forming in the creases of his eyes, but they didn't look like tears of pain; they shined in the dull hotel lighting as tears of regret. What Emi had intended to be a mercy kill as she held Rico's machete turned into a mercy phone call as she typed her number out in a text message draft and showed it to him. She could tell he was trying to tell her something and the relief that cleansed his face when he saw her number was the final proof he meant no harm. As he weakly dug his phone from the inside of his shirt, she wanted to help him but knew she couldn't; touching his phone could risk counting as taking it and killing him thanks to this malicious game. As he opened a flip phone that appeared older than him, she recognized his challenges up until this point must've been even harder than hers. Could he even access the app store to buy boosts or use it as a flashlight? She thought back to the treacherous root-like staircase she had descended with Alex using her smartphone flashlight and could only imagine how Akachukwu had accomplished it by employing such a small, weak light from his old phone, a dismal few inches of illumination. She suddenly felt a deep pity for him; like her, he had endured so much and now was being robbed of everything he fought so hard for at the very end. Emi Answered her phone and Akachukwu tried to talk to her, but the cinematic moment promised to him was fading. He couldn't mouth any words, only producing a guttural clogged muffle as his throat closed up. He realized he was living his last seconds, and grabbed blindly at his shorts pocket. Without being able to convey with words the importance of his pen from Sizwe, he summoned all the facial emotions he could muster as he gave it to her, he wanted the memory of his brother bestowed upon him to live on. Akachukwu died before he could be sure Emi got the pen, but she did; she caught his hand and accepted it. She had no evidence to prove her thoughts, but what she just took felt like something immensely important to him, almost similar to what Alex's phone felt like to her.

Before she could devote any more thoughts to her circumstances, the room began to melt around her in a rotating mess of bleeding colors. The floor and ceiling unraveled in an indescribable spinning dislocation of reality as the walls and doors peeled off in twirling rough indentations of mass. It was sensory overload, she couldn't grasp everything she was witnessing, almost like a blind person seeing a fireworks show for the first time. Suddenly it felt like gravity was pulling her in all directions at once, and then she was falling in a weightless tumble through an impenetrable black space, just like the black abyss she had experienced with Alex. The blackness devoid of light was so rich against her skin and clothes that she couldn't even tell the background perspective apart from her body; it felt like she was falling through an infinite nothingness, like a black hole. Before she could rationalize anything she wasn't falling anymore, she was standing on another purple root structure, but this time it was different, in the distance and all around her she could see too many roots to count, all branching off and leading to a center point, a spinal cord like structure that was as big long ways as a large city. She mistakenly thought her journey was over, but she was wrong; snaking black veins with a consistency similar to the ooze that had formed the doorway to the truth or dare game lifted themselves off the trunk of the surface beneath her like some kind of parasitic root-like fungus and plunged themselves into her skin, warping her reality. Her flesh seized in on itself, a vermiculation of branching convulsions rippling under its surface like tiny relentless snakes. Emi's mind folded, unfolded, and refolded in on itself countless times as she was plunged into a prismatic world of nonsense, a lot of sense and no sense. She was no longer in her physical body nor a weightless form, but rather, a facsimile of a human mind as she hurdled at the speed of light towards something all-knowing and sinister. Then, as her mind was still spinning, she wasn't moving anymore, her consciousness was stationary in a black void. There was nothing to visually perceive, yet somehow she heard the inhuman voice through a nervous system of information she was now part of, "Welcome to our colony." Something pulsed in her mind, and she could see a strange, alien structure, something that appeared to be the source of the spinal cord and, by extension, the root structures. The voice was the same but different; instead of sounding like a single wicked entity impersonating a human's voice, it sounded like thousands doing so all at once as it spoke.

"Emily Wyatt, what is your wish?"

Emi thought for a moment, too many thoughts really, but she settled on what bothered her the most. She prefaced with an intelligent defense, "This isn't my wish; it's a simple question." She had no physical body, yet she still envisioned her fists curling as she asked, "What the hell are you?"